The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) tests whether a model can infer an unseen transformation from a few input-output examples and apply it to a new grid. Looped visual reasoners refine predictions over multiple iterations, but conventional training constrains only the final output, leaving intermediate refinements unconstrained. We propose that these refinements should instead follow the transformation step by step. We introduce TraceViT, a looped visual reasoner trained with semantically monotonic transformation chains. We obtain these chains by rewriting and verifying programmatic task implementations, decomposing each solution into intermediate grid states. Each iteration is grounded by a task reference derived from the few-shot demonstrations and an object workspace representing the current grid state. Because these chains may differ in length from the loop, soft trace alignment enforces only their ordering, letting the model allocate iterations freely. TraceViT achieves 67.8% pass@2 on ARC-AGI-1 and 24.3% on ARC-AGI-2. Controlled ablations on ARC-AGI-1 show that trace supervision becomes beneficial only when paired with grounding. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/LiuBinnan/TraceViT.
The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC;~\citealp{chollet2019measure}) contains tasks that require summarizing patterns from limited grid samples and predicting output grids. Recently, many large language model based approaches have attempted to transform it into a text-based reasoning task. However, methods based on open-source models have generally yielded unsatisfactory results, while those relying on closed-source models are too costly. Current efforts mainly focus on data augmentation, constructing ARC-like data for more comprehensive supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we argue that solving ARC-like problems requires not only \textit{positive} sample supervision but also the ability to improve model reasoning by distinguishing \textit{negative} samples. To this end, we draw on the idea of preference alignment and propose \textsc{DiARC}, a method that constructs preference pairs to enable the model to distinguish between them. Specifically, we propose three ways to construct negative samples, including output-level visual transformations, DSL-level rule inversion, and task-specific rule editing. The resulting negative samples provide informative near-miss alternatives while keeping the observed demonstrations unchanged. Experimental results across multiple ARC-like benchmarks show that \textsc{DiARC} consistently improves performance over baseline models. The code is released at https://github.com/szu-tera/DiARC.
The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is viewed as a critical avenue to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), as it enables models to learn abstract transformation rules from few-shot examples and then generalize to new tasks. However, prevalent ARC methodology is either pure language or vision-only (i.e., VARC). The former depends heavily on LLMs, consuming billions of parameters. The latter often struggles to capture high-level semantics, leading to overfitting on pixel-level patterns. To bridge this gap, we propose L-VARC, a novel framework that enhances visual reasoning via a language-guided Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) branch. Specifically, we design a Semantic Compression Module by feeding a unified, task-agnostic prompt into DeepSeek-V3. In this way, the raw LARC (a crowd-sourced language description dataset) can be substantially refined and structured, fitting with the context length constraint of standard text encoders (e.g., CLIP). Moreover, we design a Cross-Attention Projector to align visual features with semantic embeddings, aiming to guide the training of the ARC model. Notably, the LUPI branch is taken in the training process and will be discarded during inference, thereby yielding a lightweight model with a mere 18 million parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our L-VARC effectively leverages linguistic priors to boost visual reasoning and outperforms state-of-the-art. Ablation studies further confirm the contribution of the two new designs towards the L-VARC framework. The code is available at https://github.com/GZHU-DVL/L-VARC.